Our Solutions

How Mechanical Orchard builds confidence

Our approach is designed to increase confidence and reduce risk through demonstrating meaningful progress at every step.

Recreate and Deliver

Based on our learnings, we build a perfect replica of this component in a secure cloud environment where it’s subject to rigorous performance and functional criteria before it goes live. Now this component is modern, tested, instrumented and well understood. Most importantly, it’s ready for innovation—while running smoothly with the rest of the legacy system.

Repeat and Innovate

The process iterates with the next component until the entire system has deployed into the cloud environment. Each subsequent component could take progressively less time through applying our AI tools and organizational learnings.

Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time.

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Analyse and Comprehend

“Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. 
Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from day one.”


-VP, Software Engineering, Global Logistics Company

We begin by studying the existing system to comprehend how it works. Together with the client, we select an application and zoom in on a single workload to start, usually the one that is hardest, riskiest, or both. This proves we can tackle the entire system. We learn how it behaves, operates, and relates to the rest of the current system, which forms the basis for creating behavioral tests of the workload.

Our AI tooling speeds up this process, from creating detailed dependency diagrams to monitoring how the system handles tasks. It allows us to complete our analysis in a few weeks instead of several months.

Recreate and Deliver Incrementally

“Mechanical Orchard began by analyzing all the data flows through a single, critical system component, then precisely replicated its behavior in a cloud-based test environment with perfect fidelity. 
That’s a powerful proof point.”

-CIO, Global Logistics and Transportation Company

First, we establish a secure cloud environment connected to the legacy environment through a VPN. We then rewrite the workload in a modern language, guided by automated tests, then place it into the cloud environment, where it’s subjected to performance and functionality equivalence tests using actual data flows.

Once this workload is performing exactly as required, it moves into the production environment: the client can now decommission the legacy counterpart. Now, the newly-modernized workload is working in tandem with the legacy environment—with no disruption to the system overall.

We continue to rewrite the remaining workloads until the entire recreated system is confidently and securely running in the modern environment.

Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time.

Accelerate and Innovate Safely

“It's impressive the level of knowledge that you all were able to build around what has always been hailed as almost impossible to understand, even by the people on my team.  The command of  the subject matter and the methodical approach that you brought to this is quite impressive.”

-CIO, Global Beverage Company

Moving forward, each subsequent workload deploys faster and faster, based on our tooling and what we’ve learned from prior workloads. Across both legacy and cloud environments, we continuously monitor and test the new behavior against live data running in real-time validating identical performance and function to the original and preventing any unexpected interruptions or surprises.

Once all workloads are deployed, the entire application can be turned off - and you have a fully functional, exact copy of this critical system running in the cloud.

The Mechanical Orchard approach reduces risks

The Mechanical Orchard engagement
approach is designed to reduce risk and
demonstrate meaningful progress at every step.

The Exploratory Workshop

What is the most critical
business application?
What's connected to it?

The Pilot
-

Can it be done?
What will it take?
Build initial roadmap

The Steel
Thread

Get to production
Address risk early
Validate the approach

Accelerate
-

Tune for speed
Clear remaining risks
Tackle remaining mass
Make future change easy

1. Exploratory Workshop

In the Exploratory Workshop, we will learn about you, your business, and your biggest pain points when it comes to your legacy system. The goal is to understand the most impactful path forward to show success early and often.

Together, we’ll identify the best starting point for modernizing—it could be a system component or a single workflow.  We’ll gather the information we need to identify the top risks associated with modernizing this particular component and get a sense of the degree of complexity.

The workshop is free and lasts between 2-3 hours. Afterwards, we’ll deliver a detailed estimate of the effort involved for the next stage and propose a roadmap for moving forward.

"During our exploratory workshop, Mechanical Orchard identified, inventoried, and ranked  current and potential future risks of the system, along with recommended strategies for mitigation in the modernization process."

— CIO, Local Government

2. Pilot

The goal of the Pilot is to deliver the component or workflow selected in the Exploratory Workshop as working software in a test environment. As part of this, we’ll interview key stakeholders, review documentation and user manuals, and use various tools to get a deep understanding of the system, its behavior, and its context.

Based on our learnings, we build a replica of the component or workflow in a secure cloud environment, test it and ensure it performs exactly as it does in your legacy environment. This gives us a concrete understanding of how much time and effort it will take to modernize this component in the production environment—and a better estimate of the time and effort to modernize the entire system—and it surfaces anything that might pose a risk to successful migration.

"Mechanical Orchard began by analyzing all the data flows through a single, critical system component, then precisely replicated its behavior in a cloud-based test environment with perfect fidelity. That’s a powerful proof point."

— CIO, Global Logistics and Transportation Company

3. Steel Thread

In the Steel Thread phase, we’ll deliver the selected component or workflow into production—only after all of us are confident it’s performing well enough to cut over into the cloud. This cloud environment is fully provisioned and secure to your specifications, and works hand-in-hand with the legacy environment to minimize disruption.

With this one, modernized workflow in the cloud, you’re able to see it performing with the rest of your system. Through this effort, we’ve surfaced the majority of issues and risks and can begin to pave and accelerate the path forward for the rest of the system based on real, learned experience.

"Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from day one."

— VP, Software Engineering, Global Logistics Company

4. Accelerate and Innovate

By the Accelerate and Innovate phase, all major risks have been identified and addressed. At this point, we tackle the remaining mass of the overall system, continually tuning for speed. Our Pollux equivalence monitoring system ensures that each incremental component meets or exceeds existing performance and functional requirements before it’s deployed into the cloud.

"You have gone further than any modernization effort we’ve ever experienced."

— CIO, F500 Global Retailer

Analyze and Comprehend

“Mechanical Orchard’s team made quick work of dissecting our legacy systems, core business processes, and charted a course for our future technology. 
Their disciplined approach to solving ‘the hard problems’ in software engineering is unparalleled in the industry, and delivered results from day one.”


-VP, Software Engineering, Global Logistics Company

We begin by studying the existing system to comprehend how it works. Together with the client, we select an application and zoom in on a single workload to start, usually the one that is hardest, riskiest, or both. This proves we can tackle the entire system. We learn how it behaves, operates, and relates to the rest of the current system, which forms the basis for creating behavioral tests of the workload.

Our AI tooling speeds up this process, from creating detailed dependency diagrams to monitoring how the system handles tasks. It allows us to complete our analysis in a few weeks instead of several months.

Recreate and Deliver Incrementally

“Mechanical Orchard began by analyzing all the data flows through a single, critical system component, then precisely replicated its behavior in a cloud-based test environment with perfect fidelity. 
That’s a powerful proof point.”

-CIO, Global Logistics and Transportation Company

First, we establish a secure cloud environment connected to the legacy environment through a VPN. We then rewrite the workload in a modern language, guided by automated tests, then place it into the cloud environment, where it’s subjected to performance and functionality equivalence tests using actual data flows.

Once this workload is performing exactly as required, it moves into the production environment: the client can now decommission the legacy counterpart. Now, the newly-modernized workload is working in tandem with the legacy environment—with no disruption to the system overall.

We continue to rewrite the remaining workloads until the entire recreated system is confidently and securely running in the modern environment.

Because we only work with a single component at a time, each one has a proven fallback method. This profoundly limits the risk to your living, breathing system at any given time.

Accelerate and Innovate Safely

“It's impressive the level of knowledge that you all were able to build around what has always been hailed as almost impossible to understand, even by the people on my team.  The command of  the subject matter and the methodical approach that you brought to this is quite impressive.”

-CIO, Global Beverage Company

Moving forward, each subsequent workload deploys faster and faster, based on our tooling and what we’ve learned from prior workloads. Across both legacy and cloud environments, we continuously monitor and test the new behavior against live data running in real-time validating identical performance and function to the original and preventing any unexpected interruptions or surprises.

Once all workloads are deployed, the entire application can be turned off - and you have a fully functional, exact copy of this critical system running in the cloud.

Background Trees

Your New Legacy
Starts Here.

We believe that every company deserves to realize their vision, free of constraints from the past. Our team's approach, learning aptitude and experience can help them move into this evolving version safely, reliably, fearlessly.

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